"There are lots of things we do that are irrelevant," Alan Simpson once said, "but that's what the Senate is for." The same might be said of the California state legislature, which year in and year out demonstrates an impressive ability to legislate solutions to problems that appear pressing to almost no Californians besides those who happen to be serving in the legislature. Occasionally, this proclivity for overlegislating serves California well--for instance, when in 1998 the state banned smoking in bars and restaurants, a reasonable law that has caught on around the country. Most of the time, though, it just ends up making California look stupid. This year, in its final flurry of activity, the legislature sent more than 400 bills to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has until Sunday to decide whether to sign or veto them. (Pity his poor staffers who have to sort through this mess.) Fortunately, one bill Schwarzenegger has already decided to veto is AB 881, which would have mandated that children riding in cars sit in booster seats until the age of eight. Now, no doubt there's some public-safety benefit to this regulation--as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the bill "was prompted by a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study that showed children ages 4 to 8 who use booster seats were 59 percent less likely to be injured in an accident." What's apparently missing from the legislature's action is any sort of cost-benefit analysis taking into account the significant inconvenience (and humiliation!) this law would entail. When I was an eight-year-old in California, I rode to my second-grade class in a carpool with, as I recall, three or four other students. (None of us was in a booster seat, but somehow we all survived to adulthood.) Did anyone in the legislature stop to think about the logistical nightmare of trying to fit that many booster seats in a normal-sized car, let alone of transferring them all to a different car for the afternoon ride home? Did they stop to ponder the fact that, as Schwarzenegger noted in vetoing the bill, the current law mandating that kids be in booster seats until the age of six is already widely ignored--because, well, that law is a real pain in the neck with dubious benefits too? Of course the California legislature isn't the only organization in the country that seems to overreact to minor threats to public safety (see Michelle's post from yesterday), a tendency with a rather long history in America. It just does it more often, and more gratuitously, than anyone else. Luckily the governor has more common sense in his biceps than the 120 members of the legislature have collectively. --Josh Patashnik